How to tune a guitar

Standard tuning, lowest string to highest

Hold the guitar in playing position. The thickest string, nearest your face, is string six and it is the lowest note. The thinnest, nearest the floor, is string one.

Two E strings, two octaves apart, at either end. That symmetry is worth noticing because it is the first sanity check: if your first and sixth strings are not both reading E, something is on the wrong peg.

Tuning with a clip-on tuner

1. 1

   Clip the tuner to the headstock and switch it on

   The headstock is the flat piece at the end of the neck where the tuning pegs are. A clip-on reads vibration through the wood rather than sound through the air, which is why it works in a noisy room where a phone app does not.

2. 2

   Set it to chromatic mode if it has one

   Chromatic means it tells you the nearest note to whatever you played, rather than assuming you are already close. That is what a beginner needs, because a badly out-of-tune string may be nowhere near the note it should be.

3. 3

   Play the sixth string on its own and let it ring

   One string at a time, fretting nothing. Pluck it with a normal amount of force - very hard plucking pushes the pitch up briefly and makes the reading jump around.

4. 4

   Read the letter first, then the needle

   If the tuner shows a different letter entirely, you are far off and turning the peg a long way is correct. Once it reads E, the needle or colour tells you whether you are sharp (too high) or flat (too low).

5. 5

   Turn the machine head slowly and watch the display

   Small movements. A quarter turn moves the pitch a surprising amount on the thin strings. Keep plucking as you turn so the tuner is reading a live note.

6. 6

   Finish by coming up to the note, not down to it

   If you overshoot, drop the string clearly below pitch and bring it back up. Arriving from below seats the string in the nut and around the post, and it is the single reason one person's tuning holds and another's slips within a minute.

7. 7

   Repeat on strings five to one, then check the sixth again

   Bringing five strings up to tension bends the neck very slightly, which pulls the first one you tuned out again. One full pass, then a second check, and it is done.

Which way do I turn it?

There is no universal answer, because it depends on which side of the headstock the peg is and how the string is wound on. So do not memorise a direction — learn the two-second test instead.

Turn the peg a small amount and watch the tuner. If the pitch went the wrong way, turn the other way. That is the whole technique, and it works on every guitar including the ones where three pegs turn one way and three the other.

The one thing to avoid is turning a peg a long way while watching your hand rather than the tuner. That is how a thin string gets snapped, and how a beginner concludes that tuning is dangerous.

Why it goes out of tune again ten minutes later

On a new guitar or a new set of strings, this is normal and it is not a fault. A fresh string stretches for the first few hours of playing, and every stretch drops the pitch. Tune it, play for five minutes, tune it again, and repeat a few times. After the first day or two it settles.

You can speed it up: after tuning, take hold of each string over the soundhole or pickups and pull it gently away from the fretboard an inch or so, then retune. Two or three cycles of that does most of the stretching in a few minutes.

If a guitar drifts out of tune within a song and the strings are not new, something else is going on. The most common causes are cheap tuning machines that slip, a string wound badly around its post, or strings that are simply finished. Old strings will not hold pitch reliably and they sound dull — when to change guitar strings covers the signs, and the standard light-gauge acoustic set above is cheap enough to change on schedule rather than when they die.

Tuning by ear, and the fifth-fret method

Worth learning eventually, not first. The classic method is relative tuning: get the sixth string right with a tuner, then fret it at the fifth fret and match the open fifth string to it. Repeat from the fifth string to the fourth, and the fourth to the third. The one exception is the second string, which is matched from the fourth fret of the third string rather than the fifth.

The advantage is that the guitar will sound in tune with itself even if it is slightly off concert pitch. The disadvantage is that small errors compound along the way, and it does not help a beginner who cannot yet hear a small difference in pitch. Learn it as a backup for when the tuner battery dies.

Tunings other than standard

Two come up early, usually because a song asks for them, and both are simple once standard tuning is second nature.

Half a step down lowers every string by one fret, giving Eb Ab Db Gb Bb Eb. A chromatic tuner shows the flat names directly, so the method is unchanged: tune each string until the display reads the new letter. It is common in rock recordings, and it makes the strings slightly slacker and easier to bend, which is a small bonus for a beginner.

Drop D changes only the sixth string, from E down to D, and leaves the other five alone. It is the easiest alternate tuning to learn and the easiest to undo. Because only one string moves, bring it back up to E from below when you are finished rather than easing it down, for exactly the reason above.

Whatever the tuning, the guitar has to be capable of holding it. Strings past their life will not hold any tuning reliably, and neither will a badly wound string.

The three mistakes beginners make

• Tuning to the wrong octave. Turning a string up a long way can land it an octave high, at which point the tuner reads the correct letter and the string is dangerously tight. Check the octave number on the display, and be suspicious if a string suddenly feels very stiff.
• Fretting a note while tuning. Every string is tuned open, with nothing held down. A beginner pressing the string anywhere on the neck tunes it to the wrong pitch.
• Tuning once and then playing for a week. A guitar drifts with temperature and humidity even when nothing is wrong with it. Tuning before every session takes thirty seconds and it is the difference between practising the right pitches and practising the wrong ones.

If it still sounds wrong in tune

A guitar can be perfectly tuned open and still sound out of tune when you play a chord up the neck. That is intonation rather than tuning, and it is set at the bridge by a shop during a setup. It is one of the several things a setup fixes, and on a cheap new guitar it is usually worth the money — the reasoning is on the main guitar roundup, and the starter kit page covers the tuner, strings and stand a first guitar needs alongside it.